[ben1040]

I have a Verizon Thunderbolt, and the battery life absolutely sucks compared to the iPhone 4. AnandTech did a great comparison [1]. The other 3 phones on their LTE lineup are all huge too, with equally bad battery life (maybe with the exception of the new Droid Bionic, which some reviews say has OK battery life but still nowhere near the iPhone 4).

The other dimension besides battery life is size, and all their LTE phones are pretty big size-wise. My Thunderbolt is huge compared to my old Nexus One or my wife's iPhone 4. I don't know if the bigger screen is now what Android manufacturers feel the market wants, but the thing is fairly thick too, and I imagine that's due to having to pack in all the LTE guts.

I think the iPhone, even with 3G, can still hold its own given both the major size and battery life advantages it has.

[1] http://www.anandtech.com/show/4240/htc-thunderbolt-review-fi...

[rsynnott]

Wow, hadn't realised it was THAT bad. That's unusable, surely?

[ben1040]

It's pretty awful in the stock configuration, at least unless you disable LTE (in which case why did you buy an LTE phone?) or root it and use SetCPU.

Honestly, it's BS that you need to either root the device or disable its flagship feature to get acceptable battery life out of it. It's annoying enough that depending on what the new iPhone looks like, I'm tempted to bite the bullet and pay full price for it since I'm not eligible for an upgrade.